AMD A10-7850K And A8-7600: Kaveri Gives Us A Taste Of HSA

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I Do Look at the A8-7600, If the $120 Price tag were true, then it's going to be a Great value TBH. Add that with a R7 240 and you'll get a pretty capable gaming PC there. However, I would rather get a Vishera successor to upgrade my 'still going strong' 8120 Or an Athlon in an FM2 Package with steamroller cores. Cheers, No fanboyism!
 
Great review! But the product itself, not so great unfortunately.The A10 Kaveri makes no sense whatsoever. The A8 seems to offer good value, but I'm not sure who they are targeting with such a chip. I mean if you don't care about graphics performance, you're better off buying a cheaper Intel with superior CPU performance. And if you do care about graphics (for gaming, for example), then these APUs just aren't powerful enough to satisfy your needs. As Chris said, if you're really on a budget, get a really cheap Athlon and combine it with a Radeon HD 7750 for far superior performance for about the same price.Maybe if Mantle provides a massive boost in performance, this could change. But I really doubt this will happen.
 
If you want cheap gaming and general task computing, you'll be better off buying a cheap IB Pentium G + Radeon HD7770GE. It is costing US$175 on newegg, so I don't see a point in going for the APU unless you desperately need the machine TDP to be a tad lower.
 


I would probably go with a Haswell Pentium G, but I agree with the overall idea. A G3220 is only $5 more than a G2020. The 100mhz higher clock speed on top of Haswell IPC improvements makes it worth $5. :)
 
To those who say a cheaper GPU + CPU can beat the APUs should remember that the overall power consumption is far lower in APUs and if you pick it with some cheap but fast RAM ( you can find 4/8GB RAM @ 1866 or 2133 MHz in 45/90 around respectively if your lucky ) they can be at par with those combos if not beat em.
 
I think that we have to keep in mind that without the OpenCl 2 and Mantle benefits being utilized that this APU will not beat a more expensive 4570k or any Haswell Core i5 that utilizes L3 cache in single threaded apps. There is a lot of potential to squeeze out of this APU, and it's up to the developers. I would buy this over the Athlon X4/7750 suggestion due to the potential and the solid performance gains that can be received down the road, aka a little futureproofing. My hope is that future APU's end up with L3 on them.
 


Power consumption doesn't really bother me much if the performance is far better. 134w for a Pentium G and 7770, I could live with that and enjoy the far better gaming performance. The 39 extra watts vs the 7850k isn't going to affect my power bill very much.
 


Even at 5.0ghz it would probably still lose to an FX 8320 @ 4.7. :lol:
 

Intel G3220 ($69) + R7 240 ($69) = $138 => better price, better power consumption and better performance.

 


^This. Granted multitasking performance might not be as good, but for a basic, every day rig, that does some light gaming, it is a far better deal. Probably make a half decent lower resolution rig for WoW, FFXI, and such. Actually it would probably own FFXI considering what I used to play it on. :lol:
 
Kaveri essentially halved power consumption and staying at the same performance?I'd wager we just saw the first half of what Intel did afterwards with the Pentium 4; half the power usage, same performance. Now if AMD can scale up the performance and increase the power usage from this baseline, we've got a winner.
 
Nope.
Look at the efficiency graph (basically performance per watt):
Richland A10-6800K: 233.0 Wh
Kaveri A10-7850K: 184.3 Wh => ~21% reduced power consumption.
Richland A8-6500T: 172 Wh => 26% reduced power consumption.
 
promising looking results. Kudos to you AMD and keep at it. on another thought, anyone wonder if Intel has thought of heterogeneous computing before and decided it isn't 'worthwhile' with current technologies? I mean Intel continues to spend boatloads of money in R&D (like 10X or more than AMD), and those researchers aren't sitting there watching youtube either. I think the lack of innovation from Intel's side is a sign that this type of technology will not give us any noticeable gain in performance until the fab process further improves (maybe with 14nm). Therefore Intel deems actually manufacturing the thing unprofitable and kicked the can down the road
 
Quote :
Personally, I’d go for a $75 Athlon X4 740 and a Radeon HD 7750 for close to the same amount of money...

Well then, let's throw them in the mix. And while we're at it, add Pentium G and Geforce GT 640. It will be one helluva fight.
 
I'm a bit disappointed that the Steamroller core isn't going to be put into an FX CPU but since I just got my FX-8350, I'm in no hurry to upgrade. I think that may be a part of the reason why they're not making any Steamroller FX CPUs. The Piledriver CPUs are selling like mad and there are still some Bulldozer CPUs floating around in the market. It wouldn't make sense for AMD to hurry the Steamroller FX CPU to production right now because it would only saturate the market further. The APUs have been selling so well that they're probably out of Piledriver APUs and so this Kaveri release was needed. I'm sure they're happy to have more time to tweak it more so that it will be as good as is humanly possible. If they release it too early, enthusiasts will be crying foul and nobody will buy the thing. Personally, I'm glad that something AMD is doing is actually making them money on the CPU side because that is how their products improve, with money for R&D. Anyone whining about this is either a moron or an Intel shill paid to say bad things about AMD.
 
Over the last couple of years, the enthusiast part of me has been so disappointed by AMD that these chips' failure to live up to hype really comes as no surprise; but the business / mainstream side of me sees where AMD is going, and from that perspective, it looks GREAT. I want to see what this does in the mobile space; something as powerful as a HD7750 at 1368x768 will do very well, and may even allow for reasonable battery life.
 
Has anyone noticed that Kaveri has about double the transistor count of Haswell CPUs? Kind of crazy, given the performance.

Yes, kind of. They have the Xeon Phi which uses the MIC architecture. You can use existing C++ code and just recompile for Xeon and run it on the co-processor (meaning you don't have to learn CUDA, OpenCL, etc.), which is pretty awesome. But there is no MMU, AFAIK.

Make no mistake. Intel CPU architecture is improving as well (QuickSync g3, AVX2, 2 more execution ports and instruction-level parallelism => better branch prediction, superscalar and out-of-order execution, etc.). It is not just die shrinks.
 
I think that we have to keep in mind that without the OpenCl 2 and Mantle benefits being utilized that this APU will not beat a more expensive 4570k or any Haswell Core i5 that utilizes L3 cache in single threaded apps. There is a lot of potential to squeeze out of this APU, and it's up to the developers. I would buy this over the Athlon X4/7750 suggestion due to the potential and the solid performance gains that can be received down the road, aka a little futureproofing. My hope is that future APU's end up with L3 on them.
 
From Article: "Personally, I’d go for a $75 Athlon X4 740 and a Radeon HD 7750 for close to the same amount of money…at least until HSA-optimized software gives us a reason to favor Kaveri-based APUs."Only problem with this comment, is that you would not get True Audio or Mantle Support. Mantle could provide upto a 20% boost in supported games. You can't get that with a Radeon HD 7750. And if anyone did buy that combo, they would be better off buying the Athlon x4 750 for the same price, but getting an additional 200MHz CPU clock.
 

read in the review, what chris said about trueaudio.

kaveri has gcn igpu, radeon hd 7750 has gcn igpu. 7750 has gddr5 vram (the gddr5 version), higher core clockrate. mantle will support any gpu with gcn uarch (according to amd). missing parts would be huma and the shared memory controller thingie, dual graphics, memory bottleneck for the igpu etc.
 
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